Amy Schneider’s ‘Jeopardy!’ Reign Ends
Amy Schneider had a strange feeling about that day. It was Nov. 9, and in the first “Jeopardy!” game of the morning, she had surpassed Matt Amodio’s 38-game streak, putting her in second place for the most consecutive wins in the show’s history.
She won the next game handily. But she had reached her goal of beating Amodio, and her next major target — surpassing Ken Jennings’s 74-game record — was far away. “The fatigue of this taping was really starting to add up,” she said in an interview on Wednesday. “I couldn’t explain it, even to myself, but I just could feel that something was slipping a little bit, however much I tried to fight it.” Schneider’s gut feeling was correct (as it tends to be).
After a dazzling 40-game streak, during which she became the first woman to surpass $1 million in regular-season winnings and then the runner-up to Jennings for most consecutive games won, Schneider ended her reign during Wednesday’s game.
She was beaten by Rhone Talsma, who won during Final Jeopardy. When Schneider met Talsma, a librarian from Chicago wearing neon yellow glasses, her strange feeling about that day intensified.
